In recent years, in response to increasing awareness about disaster prevention, there are an increasing number of building structures such as houses and apartments that employ a damage control structure for suppressing seismic shocks at a time of an earth quake with use of an energy dissipating fuse. As an example of the energy dissipating fuse used for the type of energy dissipating structure, a number of building structures employ a steel fuse which dissipates vibration energy in the hysteresis due to yielding and plasticizing of a steel material when the steel material is compressed or tensiled, since it exhibits a high level of energy dissipating performance at low cost. Among steel fuses, a buckling restricted brace, which resists axial force, is a most prevailing steel fuse since it has a simple mechanism and can be designed easily. Examples of steel fuses other than the buckling restricted brace include a fuse that uses a base plate and a joint metal.
For example, Patent Document 1 discloses a damage control structure in which a base plate fuse is arranged between a pedestal part of pillar and a foundation portion. When a tensile force acts on the pillar, a flexural yielding or a shear yielding of the base plate occurs. The tensile force occurring in the pedestal part of pillar is dissipated by energy of deformation hysteresis at the time, and an energy dissipating functionality being exhibited.
Moreover, Patent Document 2 discloses a technique such that the fuse steel plate is a shape that flexural-shear-yields so that even if the fuse steel plate receives a cyclic load after having shear-yielded, increase in the shear proof stress thereof can still be suppressed.
Incidentally, in order to improve damage control performance of a building structure part, it is effective to utilize relative displacement between target members for dissipating vibrations. Therefore, other than the above fuse mechanism, it may be considered that with use of relative displacement between a foundation and a continuous footing or between a wall panel layer and a floor panel layer, the fuse is moved to dissipate vibrations and dissipate vibration energy. However, techniques disclosed in Patent Documents 1 and 2 have a problem in that they are not premised to be arranged in an extremely narrow gap such as the gap between the foundation and the continuous footing and/or the gap between the wall panel layer and the floor panel layer, and therefore, vibration energy in the type of narrow place cannot be dissipated.
If a part of a fuse is inserted between the target members that displace relatively to each other, a rigidity of inserted portion of the fuse becomes higher than that of non-inserted portion of the fuse. As a result, while a relative displacement of the part in which the fuse is inserted becomes smaller, a relative displacement of the part in which the fuse is not inserted becomes greater, and therefore, the vibration energy may not be efficiently dissipated in some cases. Therefore, it is important to insert the fuse evenly across the entire portion that would have relative displacement therein.